This piece originated as part of a group project for a composition seminar at Stanford. Our professor, Mark Applebaum, wrote a short piece for percussion trio entitled Theme in Search of Variations, of which each member of the class created a variation. I chose to pare the trio down to a duo.

In choosing specific source material for my variation, I scoured the original theme for cells that could be cycled to create a techno drum loop. The second half of the piece is based on the chosen loop, which was further adjusted to fit a meter of mostly 7/8. On top of this a bass line/melody derived from Mark's original pitch material was added. The first half of the piece is an exploration of the possibilities for deriving rhythmic material from scraped metal.